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Vendor Profile: A Chime for Healing

After spending 25 years with the City of Edmonton Fire Rescue Services, Diane Folkins began A Chime for Healing in her retirement.

As Senior Geomatic Services Coordinator, Diane spent many years making a difference in people’s lives by making sure emergency crews had the information required to be effective in a rapidly growing urban environment. Once she retired she knew that she needed to satisfy her desire to help people in a new way. A Chime for Healing Custom Wind Chimes was created as a way to help heal people who are suffering from the imbalance of the sometimes chaotic world in which we live.

Diane has always been creative and finding ways to feed her creativity and make a meaningful difference in people’s lives was a natural fit. She began by returning to her passion for woodworking. Her dad had given her a scroll saw years earlier and she began to put it to work. After scrounging through left over deck parts, she discovered some aluminum rail tubing and after a few online searches about tuning wind chimes, she was off and running.

It was Diane’s partner Lynn who suggested the chimes could be tuned to healing frequencies. After spending time researching sound healing, Diane had a solid working knowledge of ancient Solfeggio tones (created by Benedictine monks) and universal tones (used extensively by Greeks and Egyptians). Finding the tubing she needed and testing different tones, Diane began to build up a library of sounds for her products. Her process for making the tubing comes out of many months of practise and experiments. Tubing for each chime now goes through four hand sandings and three power polishes before it’s ready to be assembled. Diane uses both copper and aluminum for tubing. Copper tubing has a very intimate sound while the structural grade aluminum she uses is brighter and has a more resonant sound. She can customize and personalize any cedar embellishments and weather seals them for life with marine quality clear coat.

When choosing a wind chime, Diana likes to say,”whatever resonates with you is the one you need.” To help this process, she has a listening station at her Bountiful Farmers’ Market stall where customers can immerse themselves in the tones and find which one is right for them. She even makes “neighbour saver” wind chime mutes out of repurposed fabric from the Reuse Centre.

Did you know?

Diane’s chimes aren’t just helping those who purchase them, A Chime for Healing donates 10% of it’s sales to Wellspring Edmonton, a community-based support centre offering programs to support cancer patients.